Tuesday, May 1, 2012

Resolutions — April Update

So, March was rather a bust on the writing front. April wasn’t much better. In the last month, I wrote 4,124 words. This is not great. I mean, it’s better than April 2011, when I wrote 424 words. But it's not where I want to be with my goals. This brings me to 51,444 words written this year, which is an improvement over where I was last year at this time (18,594 words). So this is encouraging. Also encouraging is that I did focus on the one main WIP that I really want to finish. I finally decided to skip the scenes that I was having trouble writing and get to the more exciting part. I still have to go back to fill in those gaps, but I have a pretty good outline for them. And frankly, if I’m this bored writing them, why would anyone want to read them? Maybe it’s time to figure out a different approach to getting that information to the reader because the initial scenes don’t seem to be working. I only wrote nine days last month, far from my goal of writing something every day. Last month, I wrote eight days, so a tiny bit of improvement there. My best day was today, with 1,036 words.
For next month, my goals are to focus on writing every day, no matter how little. I do notice that the daily interaction with the story keeps my creativity flowing. Unfortunately, I have a work commitment that's going to eat up almost two weeks and it's not going to be easy to find time to work on my personal projects. However, I have noticed that when I have the least amount of time to work on my WIPs, that's when inspiration strikes. Maybe this time, when I'm swamped at work and stressed out, I'll figure out a way to rework those troublesome scenes.